


Coda

by Asynca



Series: The Camera Loves You-Verse [4]
Category: Tomb Raider (Video Games)
Genre: F/F, Lara's POV, set after The Camera Loves You, the stuff I couldn't post on FF.net :3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-20 12:49:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17022930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Asynca/pseuds/Asynca
Summary: Some 'good times' set after The Camera Loves You





	Coda

It was Sunday night, which meant that Yoko had gone to visit her family. Sam was still at the studio finalising  _ _Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,__  and Mr. Nishimura was presumably still at work since I was in the house alone.

It was strange being there by myself. I should have gone with Sam to the studio, but she’d insisted she’d just be in meetings all day and I’d find it all horribly boring.  I knew I was welcome to do whatever I liked at home there, but I still felt as if I was in a hotel.

Yoko had been in the middle of setting up to roll rice balls before she’d left and had been muttering something about not having them finished in time. I’d offered to finish them for her, since I figured that rolling balls with rice was something I was actually capable of achieving in the kitchen.

It was harder than it looked.

It had taken me at least twenty minutes to produce five symmetrical balls, and they’d all gone through various mutated stages of construction before they were finished. I was working on the sixth when the front gates opened and one of the black sedans pulled up into the valet circle. I hoped it wasn’t Mr. Nishimura. It was really awkward socialising with him in the absence of Sam.

I actually saw the armful of shopping bags before I saw who it was. There were so many of them they actually stuck out in front of Sam as she stepped out of the car and struggled up the stairs. I washed my hands and dried them on my apron as I went to open the door for her.

It was dark outside but she was still wearing sunglasses. She looked me up and down over the top of them as she stepped inside. “New career choice?”

I scoffed. “Don’t get used to it,” I said, and offered to help her with her bags.

She just dumped them on the floor at her feet and put her arms in the air. “I finished the tape,” she announced. “It looks amazing. I am a superstar!” She kicked her leg out to finish the star-shape, and then stepped out of her shoes and walked toward the kitchen to see what I was up to in there.

I was actually curious about the contents of the bags, because I’d given her some money to buy clothes for me and I wanted to see what she’d managed to get. I bent down and quickly peeked into them, but discovered that unless I took each item of clothing out and held it up I couldn’t tell what was for me and what wasn’t, so I gave up.

As I was standing up, Sam emerged from the kitchen, still in her sunglasses. She also had two of the rice balls in her hands and was eating a third. So much for helping Yoko, I thought.

“So, anyway,” she was saying through a mouth full of rice, “basically marketing decided they wanted to cut some of the footage of me in there anyway, because apparently it presents a nice dichotomy of hardcore versus normal girl.”

“You’re hardly a normal girl,” I pointed out. “Normal girls don’t save their best friends from winged she-demons.”

Sam shrugged. “There’s not much footage of me, anyway. Just a few shots of me crying, and they’re juxtaposed against the shots of you and Pierre shooting at each other.” She put the other two rice balls in her mouth and held her hand up. “Don’t worry about how Pierre’s presented. He’s pretty much faceless because the shots are so wide. We say his name a few times but he’s not completely identified.”

“And Larson?”

She winced. “There’s lots of footage of him,” she said. “But I made it obvious he was a good guy.” She wandered over to me as she finished her mouthful, picking up the bags and walking towards the storage room. I followed her.

Inside it, she placed them on the floor again and began sorting through them. I leant forward and picked her sunglasses off her face. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “I wondered why it was so dark. Do you like them? Ray-Ban was having a sale.”

I put them on myself. Sam made a face. “Yeah… no.” I leaned back to take a look in the mirror on her armoire and tended to agree with her assessment. Folding them up, I left them on there.

Sam was speaking as she took out items of clothing one by one. “So, anyway, the movie is fantastic. I was worried there wouldn’t be enough variety of footage and that it would all be shaky and unusable but some of it is just amazing. The anti-shake technology these days means basically nothing is ever out of focus.”

She took out a long-sleeve t-shirt and held it against me. It was a little tighter than I’d like, but the design on it was an AK47. “Really?” I raised an eyebrow at her.

She looked sheepish. “I couldn’t resist! And come on,” she said, trying to figure out how to take off my apron. “Now you’re this super dangerous heroine you need to wear some fierce clothes instead of old sweaters and cargos.”

I untied the apron and discarded it, and let her pull my ‘old sweater’ over my head. She dropped it beside us. I took the long-sleeved top from her. She was watching me a little too closely as I put it on; I could feel her eyes resting on my bare skin.

When I pulled it over the skin, she stood back and looked critically at me. “That’s actually kind of hot,” was her verdict. She went ferreting around in one of the other bag. “Now you need some sort of dangerous accessories.”

“What, like a machete and some nunchucks?”

She emerged with military-style dog-tags for my neck and some leather wrist-wraps. I had to admit I actually rather liked them. I let her put them on me and hold me in front of the mirror to reveal her masterpiece.

I examined myself. I never would have chosen such an aggressive style myself, but it didn’t look bad on me, and I liked how it made me feel. Fierce, I think Sam said. I turned sideways, and caught sight of Sam in the mirror.

Her lips were parted a little. She shook herself out of it, though. “I got pants, too,” she said, getting them for me. “Just cargos, but they go pretty well with this look, so I figured you could stick with them.” I pulled them on while she handed me a belt and went looking for a shoe box.

The cargos were the same brand I always wore, but the belt was thick leather and looked like something that was strong enough to attach rigging to. The buckle was enormous and turned my hips into the feature of my outfit. At least, that was until Sam produced the boots.

They were still ankle-boots, but instead of being the basic leather ones I always wore, they had thicker soles and a buckle and strap across the heel. It was a subtle difference, but added to the feel of my outfit.

I jogged up and down in them after I put them on to see how they felt. There was more cushioning in the soles than I was used to, and they felt heavy and expensive. I was sure Sam had spent a lot more money than I had given her.

She was practically dancing around me. “I’ve got to take a photo of this,” she said. “I mean, I knew it was going to look good, but you look fucking  _ _hot__.” She took her iPhone out of her jacket and stood back. I posed with my arms crossed and a stern expression for her. She held her phone out and snapped a couple of photos, and then pinched the screen. She made an appreciative noise. “You have to let me upload this.”

I shrugged. “I don’t mind.”

She then walked over to me to show me the photos. There  _ _were__  good. I looked like something out of an action movie, and the fading bruise on my face only added to the outfit. I also looked really dangerous and really determined.

It was such a big change from the sweet generic smile I normally sported in photos of me. I liked it. I liked this version of me.

I knelt down to take the boots off, but Sam stopped me.

I looked up at her. She was a little bashful. “Leave it on for a while,” she said. “You look hot _ _.__ ”

I raised an eyebrow at her, and then stood up slowly and turned to face her. Wearing these clothes made me  _ _feel__  fierce. “Is that so?”

She opened her mouth and closed it again. “Oh, my God,” she said, sounding a little breathless. It was a turn-on.

I looked down at the mess of bags, detached labels and various shopping debris around our feet. “Are you going to clean that up?” I asked her in the lowest register of my voice. I wondered if it was convincing.

It must have been, because Sam practically swooned. “You act like that and I’ll do whatever you like,” she said. She knelt down and started gathering it all together. I stood over her trying not to let a smile that was threatening me break through my faux-stern expression. 

She finished and stood up. “What are you going to make me do now?” she asked, grinning.

Instead of answering, I spun her and backed her into the armoire, pinning her there with a hand on her upper arm. She took a breath. “Okay,” she said, and then went to kiss me. I didn’t let her.

I traced the length of her necklace with a finger. It had a figurine of an angel at the end of it. “Nice try,” I said. “But you’re not fooling anyone.”

“You totally are,” she said, and made another attempt on my lips. In trying to prevent her from getting them, I took a step backward and tripped on shopping bags. I tumbled onto the tatami mats with Sam on top of me, landing completely on top of the shopping bags.

Sam was laughing, but I silenced her by flipping her over and kneeling astride her hips.

She went to say something, but I pressed a finger against her lips and then held it as a warning in front of her face.

Since my hand was so close to her face, she placed a kiss on it.

“Don’t speak,” I told her, trying to sound strict again. “Okay?”

She nodded, biting her lip.

I sat up, leaning my weight across her thighs. She was wearing a blouse, so I looked her directly in the eyes and slowly and deliberately unbuttoned it. Underneath it, her ribcage was rising and falling quickly as I pushed the two sides of the top open. Every time she inhaled it pulled her bra tight, pressing into the flesh of her breasts. She was wearing a front-clasp bra again, so I undid it and let that fall open, too.

It still struck me as odd that it was  _ _Sam__  underneath me, half-naked and completely gagging for it. Despite the strangeness of it, though, seeing those pink cheeks and that bare skin turned me on.She was squirming underneath me.

I wanted to run my hands and lips all over her skin and explore the softness of her breasts against her slender ribcage, but I didn’t touch her. She was desperate for it and it was kind of fun to not give it to her straight away. Instead, I undid the buckle of her skinny belt and unthreaded it from her pants, placing it beside us.

I then put just the very tips of my fingers on her stomach and trailed them along the hem of her jeans.  She sighed as if I’d already put them deep inside her knickers. I circled her bellybutton and finally went to work on the catch of her jeans. I had to sit up a little off her so she could lift her hips and I could pull them down around her ankles.

Crawling up her body, I knelt over her, putting one of my knees between her naked thighs.

I grinned at her.

“I’ve created a monster,” she murmured. “I swear to God I’m buying you nothing but combat-style clothes if this is what happens when you wear them.”

“No talking,” I reminded her sternly, but I was smiling.

I leant down and kissed between her collarbones, and then drew a line of kisses between her breasts, leaning my cheek against one of them and filling my hand with the other. When I put one of her nipples in my mouth, she inhaled sharply. I liked the way breasts felt in my hands and in my mouth, and I loved every little reaction in her as I explored the textures of them with my lips and tongue. She was so responsive; the way she moved underneath me and the hand she’d placed gently on mine over her breast… it was different than being with a guy. It was all different.

Sam was different; she was so slender and she felt so fragile to touch, it was amazing all the things she managed to do with that slight frame. I wondered if people thought the same way about me. Half-naked and underneath me, she was so vulnerable.

I sat back a little again and she opened her eyes and looked up and me. I leant down and kissed her firmly, laying my body against hers.

She made a noise and wrapped her arms around my back, putting a hand behind my head. It didn’t stay there for long, though. I felt it slip down my back and cup the seat of my trousers. She hooked her thumb into the belt and tugged. “Help me,” she murmured, turning away from my lips for a moment to speak. “I can’t get to the buckle.”

I kissed along her neck. “I thought you wanted to leave it all on?”

“But then how am I going to…” She slid her hand between us, trying to get inside my cargos.

I caught her hand and put it back beside us. “You don’t need to,” I told her, and began to kiss down her ribcage and south across her stomach.

When I glanced up she was staring down at me, transfixed. She looked a little worried, though. “Are you sure you want go down there? It’s…” she searched for a word, “it’s confronting the first time you do it.”

“I’m a survivor,” I told her with exaggerated drama. “I’ll weather the trauma of it.”

That made her chuckle. She lay her head back and put a forearm over her eyes. “I think I’m more scared than you are.”

That got my attention. I leant up on an elbow. “Scared? Why?”

She smiled wryly. “I guess I’m still kind of worried that you’ll hate it and decide you’re straight.”

I snorted. “Come on, how could anything you’ve got down there be more confronting than someone trying to stick something down my throat?”

She made a face. “Okay, that’s a good point. I’m just being paranoid again.”

I patted her. “You just lie back and relax,” I ordered.

She smiled, but didn’t remove the arm from over her eyes as she kicked off her jeans from her ankles so I could fit more comfortably between her legs.

I put my lips back against her stomach and continued my voyage downward until my chin met the lace of her knickers. I kissed along the edge of them, tickling my nose with the fabric. Following the lace around to the soft skin of her inner thighs, I kissed there, too. By the time I nuzzled the fabric between her legs, she was practically quivering with anticipation.

There wasn’t that much I’d be able to do with her knickers on, though, so I slipped my hands underneath the lace on her hips and pulled them down and off her ankles.

I had to roll to the side a little to do so, and in the process I looked up at her briefly; she  _ _did__  look scared. Her eyes were jammed shut under her arm. I would never in a million years have thought anything about sex would ever scare Sam. She’s done absolutely everything.

I ducked up briefly to kiss her. “Relax,” I whispered in her ear.

She nodded stiffly.

I kissed down her body again, and had to actually guide her to spread her legs. She was completely silent as if she was holding her breath when I looked down at her.

I wasn’t sure what she was expected me to do that made her so very scared. There was nothing down there that surprised me – her skin was completely smooth and peach-coloured. The only thing that was at all confronting about it was the fact that it belonged to my best friend and I was about to go down on it.

I put my mouth against her and pressed into her lips with my chin.

The way she responded was like a dam being breached: she released the breath she’d been holding by crying out and clutching at my head with her hands. She took a few deep breaths and then whispered, “Oh, my God… Lara…”

Thinking about the movements I enjoyed, I cycled through them with her and relished her every reaction. After a few minutes are writhing beneath me, she lifted her head off the floor and looked down her body. I stopped for a moment.

“Don’t stop,” she said breathlessly. “It’s just…”

A little confused, I put my lips back against her.

She watched me for a few moments. I must have looked like I was wondering what she was up to, because she explained. “It’s dumb lying there with my eyes closed. It’s you I’m imagining anyway. It’s always you.”

I smiled into her, and with our eyes locked I put the flat of my tongue against her the same way she’d done to me in Croatia. Her breath caught in her throat and she struggled to draw another.

I repeated other things she’d tried on me, watching her grow slack-jawed. One of the hands that had originally been behind my head was now sitting next to my face. A thumb was tenderly stroking my cheek.

This is my Sam, I thought, remembering her bouncing enthusiastically around me in my new outfit. It was the Sam who risked her life for me to rescue me from Natla, and the Sam who was constantly following me around with a goddamn camera and a big grin on her face. ‘It’s always you,’ she’d just said. Poor Sam – I’d only really been aware I wanted her for a couple of weeks and it had been torture. It must have been much longer for her. No wonder she was worried I might suddenly snap out of it.

I put my hand next to hers on my cheek. She smiled ever so slightly as I paused for a moment. “I love you,” I said quietly.

Her eyebrows converged on the middle of her forehead and she swallowed. “I love you more,” she whispered. “Lara, you have no idea. I love you so much it scares the hell out of me. You’re incredible.”

I leaned my cheek into her hand, and then went back to work using slow and deliberate strokes to bring her to the point where she couldn’t prop herself up anymore and had to lay back. She was moving so much under me it was hard for me to maintain what I was doing, and at one point she was so loud that I was sure her neighbours would call the police.

I ignored my tired jaw and kept going until I felt her thighs tense on either side of my head, muscles shaking. She was pressing her hips downward against my chin and hardly breathing until finally she called out my name, gripping my head in her hands and throwing her own back against the mats.

When she relaxed, her thigh flopping away from me, I leant on my elbows and watched her with a big smile on my face. I loved being able to do this for her.

It was a little while before she opened her eyes and looked down at me. She brushed some of the hair from my face with her fingertips.

“Don’t worry,” I told her. “I’m still not straight.”

She laughed. “Oh, my God,” she said, smacking herself in the forehead. “I’m such an idiot. It was so totally sexy right in the middle then and then I had to freak out.”

I crawled up her body and lay alongside her with a knee bent between hers. She kissed me and then made an odd face about how I tasted. She didn’t comment on it, though. I kissed her cheek, instead. “It was still pretty sexy,” I told her.

“That sounds so weird in an English accent,” she said, and then imitated me. “’Pretty sexy’.”

I poked her. “It was. At least for me.”

She smiled at me. “You should see yourself,” she said. “You just totally nailed me in quasi-combat gear. I think you’re every lesbian’s wet dream right now.” She jingled the dog-tags with her fingers. “After  _ _Lara Croft: Tomb Raider__  airs I’m going to have a lot of competition for you.”

Well, that was silly. “No, you won’t.”

She raised her eyebrows at how certain my reply was. “I won’t?”

“I’m not accepting competitors, there’s already a winner.”

Her face broke into a broad grin and she turned towards me, wrapping her arms around my shoulders. When she pulled back she had a very mischievous expression on her face. Glancing down, she undid the enormous buckle and the buttons on the cargos.

“Your turn,” she said, and then rolled me onto my back not at all as smoothly as I had flipped her.

Her hands slid straight into my knickers. “Yup,” she said, commenting on the state she found them in, “definitely not straight.”

Since her breasts were hanging in between us, I filled my hands with them. I quickly forgot about them when she slipped a couple of fingers inside me. God, that was… I couldn’t even describe it.

“You’re making those noises again,” she said, kissing my chin. “I swear I’ll never be able to hear you jumping around without being reminded of what else makes you groan.”

“Less talking,” I told her shortly.

“Okay, okay,” she said with a grin and concentrated on what she was doing to me.

She knew exactly how to do it, as well. The motions she was using… just… she was doing this thing where she twisted her fingers and I had to put a hand on her wrist to stop her for a moment. God, though, it was intense. It was so much that I had to actually close my eyes, because if I looked at her and that sultry smile she had I wouldn’t have as much time to enjoy it as I wanted to.

While I was focusing on her fingers, I didn’t notice her lean in beside my ear. “You’re  _ _so wet__ ,” she whispered. I felt those words in my groin.

“That’s all your fault,” I managed.

I could feel her grin against the tender part of my neck. She then lightly bit it.

Wow, that… I accidentally pulled up one of the tatami mats. I threw it somewhere and braced myself against the wooden floor, instead. Rolling slightly toward her, I pushed my hips into her hand while she worked me. Every time I opened my eyes, though, I saw her: my Sam. Smiling like she had a secret and with her arm stretched between my legs. There was still a sheen of sweat over her face from when I’d gone down on her, and it with the light on her skin it made her look like she was glowing faintly. She might as well have been, the way I felt about her.

I leant up to kiss her and she let me; wet, open kisses that had us needing to break for air. It was the feeling of her lips and tongue gliding over mine that finally tipped me over the edge. I pushed against her hand to press her more deeply inside me, letting her make me come while we were locked in a passionate embrace.

Afterward, we lay beside each other on the floor. It was still strange to look over at her and see naked hips and a bare thigh bent upward. Not strange in a bad way, though. It was just after years of touching and looking at her platonically, it was strange to be having this reaction to her. I liked it, though, and I loved her. I took a deep breath. And  _ _fuck__ , she was good in bed. I wondered what other tricks she had.

She saw where I was looking and smiled. She was about to comment on it, when we heard the sound of a car engine outside the front.

Alarmed, I sat up and listened, just to be one hundred per cent certain it was in front of the house. When the dull thump of a car door sounded from just outside the front stairs, we both shot up. Sam was rifling through the mess of squashed shopping bags for where her clothes had been thrown. I didn’t have time to take off the clothes Sam had bought me, so I quickly found the apron and tied it on.

As Sam was struggling to get her belt through her jeans, I took her wrist and pulled her into the kitchen while I could hear someone on the front stairs. I slid the partition shut and rushed over to the sink to turn the faucet on, washing my hands and splashing my face and chin. Sam held her hands under the flow while I smoothed her hair.

Please don’t be Mr. Nishimura, I thought. Oh, God,  _ _please__  don’t be Mr. Nishimura…

It was Yoko, and when she wandered into the kitchen, we couldn’t possibly have looked more awkward.

She looked between us with narrowed eyes, and then at the two lonely rice balls in the bowl.

Looking sideways at Sam myself, I realised her shirt was buttoned in the wrong holes. I couldn’t even imagine how my hair looked.

“How’s your family?” Sam attempted.

Yoko ignored her. “I hope you didn’t break anything,” she told us, and then pointed at my boots. “No shoes in the house.”


End file.
